But how the Duke, if really he had had a chance to marry Edith, could have taken the type-writer instead, baffled speculation. Thorpe gave more attention to this problem, during dinner, than he did to the conversation of the table. His exchange of sporadic remarks with the young Duchess beside him was indeed an openly perfunctory affair, which left him abundant leisure to contemplate her profile in silence, while she turned to listen to the general talk, of which Miss Madden and the Hon. Winifred Plowden bore the chief burden. The talk of these ladies interested him but indifferently, though the frequent laughter suggested that it was amusing. He looked from his wife to the Duchess and back again, in ever-recurring surprise that the coronet had been carried past Edith. And once he looked a long time at his wife and the Duke, and formulated the theory that she must have refused him. No doubt that was why she had been sympathetically fond of him ever since, and was being so nice to him now. Yes—clearly that was it. He felt upon this that he also liked the Duke very much.
It was by no means so apparent that the Duke liked him. Both he and his Duchess, indeed, were scrupulously and even deferentially polite, but there was a painstaking effect about it, which, seemingly, they lacked the art altogether to conceal. It seemed to Thorpe that the other guests unconsciously took their cue from this august couple, and all exposed somewhat the effort their civility to him involved. At another time the suspicion of this would have stung him. He had only to glance across the table to where his wife sat now, and it was all right. What other people thought of him—how other people liked or disliked him—was of no earthly importance. Whenever he chose to exert himself, he could compel from them the behaviour that he desired. It was their dull inability to read character which prompted them to regard him as merely a rich outsider who had married Edith Cressage. He viewed with a comfortable tolerance this infirmity of theirs. When the time came, if he wanted to do so, he could awaken them to their delusion as by forked lightning and the burst of thunder.
The whim came to him, and expanded swiftly into a determination, to contrive some intimate talk forthwith with the Duke. The young man seemed both clever and sensible, and in a way impressionable as well. Thorpe thought that he would probably have some interesting things to say, but still more he thought of him as a likely listener. It would be the easier to detach him from the company, since the occasion was one of studied informality. The Duke did not go about in society, in the ordinary sense of the word, and he would not have come to High Thorpe to meet a large party. He was here as a kinsman and friend of his hostess for a quiet week; and the few other guests fitted readily enough into the picture of a family gathering. The spirit of domesticity had indeed so obviously descended upon the little group in the drawing-room, an hour or so after dinner, that Thorpe felt it quite the natural thing to put his arm through that of the Duke and lead him off to his personal smoking-room. He even published his intention by audibly bidding the Hon. Balder Plowden to remain with the ladies.
When the two had seated themselves in soft, low easy-chairs, and the host had noted with pleasure that his guest had no effeminate qualms in the matter of large rich cigars, a brief silence ensued.
“I am very anxious to get your views on a certain subject,” Thorpe was inspired to begin, bluntly pushing preliminaries aside. “If a man of fortune wishes to do genuine good with his money, here in England, how should he best go about it?”
The Duke looked up at his questioner, with a sudden flash of surprise on his dark, mobile face. He hesitated a moment, and smiled a little. “You ask of me the sum of human wisdom,” he said. “It is the hardest of all problems; no one solves it.”
Thorpe nodded his big head comprehendingly. “That's all the more reason why it ought to be solved,” he declared, with slow emphasis.
The other expressed by look and tone an augmented consciousness of the unexpected. “I did not know,” he remarked cautiously, “that this was a matter in which you were specially concerned. It pleases me very much to hear it. Even if the solution does not come, it is well to have as many as possible turning the problem over in their minds.”
“Oh, but I'm going to solve it!” Thorpe told him, with round confidence.
The Duke pulled contemplatively at his cigar for a little. “Do not think me a cynic,” he began at last. “You are a man of affairs; you have made your own way; you should be even more free from illusions than I am. If you tell me that these good things can be done, I am the last one to dispute you. But I have seen near at hand experiments of exceptional importance, on a very grand scale, and the result does not encourage me. I come to doubt indeed if money has any such power in these affairs as we think it has—for that matter, if it has any power at all. The shifting of money can always disorganize what is going on at the moment—change it about and alter it in many ways—but its effect is only temporary. As soon as the pressure is released, the human atoms rearrange themselves as they were before, and the old conditions return. I think the only force which really makes any permanent difference is character—and yet about even that I am not sure. The best man I have ever known—and in many respects the ablest—devoted untold energy and labour, and much money, too, to the service of a few thousand people in Somerset, on land of his own, upon a theory wonderfully elaborated and worked out. Perhaps you have heard of Emanuel Torr and his colony, his System?”